Mozambican war veterans seem to have had enough of President Filipe Nyusi, according to an article published Tuesday’s edition of the weekly Evidências.
With the headline “Generals and the Nyusi wing out of sync”, the article looks into the ruling Frelimo party’s succession process under the military prism, adding that veterans of the war for Mozambique’s liberation from the yoke of Portuguese colonialism consider the president a casting error who is partly to blame for failure of the war against the Islamist insurgency raging in the northern Cabo Delgado province.
Calling the group of war veterans not aligned with the Nyusi wing the country’s “moral reserve”, the newspaper says that their focus is rescuing Mozambique from the chaos and disaster in which it finds itself. According to Evidências, the generals “blame Nyusi for the poor investment in the army, which is proving increasingly incapable of dealing with the country’s challenges, especially in Cabo Delgado, and what they call the dismantling of SISE (State Security and Intelligence Service.”
The newspaper adds that the generals have their own man in the succession battle in retired general Hama Thai, who has been very discreet apparently to avoid attacks from Nyusi and his secretary-general, Roque Silva, and their minions in the intricate succession battle.
Comment
The “dismantling of SISE” argument is rooted in the fact the Nyusi created the conditions for the intelligence service to be exposed during the trial of the $2.2 billion “hidden debts” scandal worth of obtained from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB Russia by three Mozambican companies, ProIndicus, EMATUM (Mozambique Tuna Company) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management), with the sole contractor and supplier, the Abu Dhabi-based group Privinvest, selling them fishing boats, radar stations and other assets at exceedingly inflated prices, between 2013 and 2014.
The companies were established by SISE and two companies from the ministries of Defence and of the Interior as special purpose vehicles to ensure that the loans flew below the radar of international financial organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It was during the trial presided by a civil judge that the workings of SISE were laid bare for all to behold, including foreign intelligence services.
Furthermore, during Nyusi’s tenure SISE had quite a turnover of directors for an intelligence institution, which was interpreted as done to weaken it.
Meanwhile, Nyusi gave police more power over the military in the fight against the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, which is strange because the police is tasked with keeping public order and security and not wage war as such – an economist expert told Mozambique Insights that this might owe to the fact that by giving police control of the war, Nyusi was implicitly giving police commissioner, Bernardino Rafael, control over a fabulous slush fund for the acquisition of military equipment – Rafael belongs to the same Makonde ethnic group as Nyusi. As police commissioner, he has survived two ministers of the Interior in a nine-year period, without anything to show in the fight against crime, especially kidnappings. Consequently, the lack of investment in the military seems also to be another crime the old guard have levelled against him.
Although Mozambique grew by 5.5 percent in 2023, the cost of living has grown, and some of the economic measures taken by government did not bear satisfactory results; government implemented a single payroll table in the public sector to harmonise the dozens of payrolls, which caused great chaos in the system; doctors, nurses and health professionals, as well as teachers went on a strike demanding a better pay and improved working conditions to no avail. All this is said to have contributed to dissatisfaction with Frelimo, which became apparent in how Mozambicans voted in the October 2023 municipal elections – in the major municipalities Frelimo won because of fraud husbanded by the electoral bodies and the Constitutional Council.
It is a sign that things have worsened during Nyusi’s tenure of office that war veterans are even considering throwing one of their own into the ring. But however chaotic the state of national security might be, it does not follow that the country should have a person with a military background at its helm as seems to be the implicit manifesto of the generals.
The country needs a civilian government with advisors with a military background or experience to solve the most pressing security problems – the insurgency and drug trafficking – facing Mozambique, with the appropriate pragmatism and professionalism.
The economy needs a clear signal of control of the situation and a focus on economic development, and nothing that reminds or leads to the thought of the hardening or perceived erosion of constitutional freedoms.
And for its part, Frelimo needs to distance itself from the machinations that have come to plague it, as seems to the case in the succession battle. While the newspaper writes about the war veterans apparent position, there is a businessman with no political or military credentials circulating Hama Thai’s alleged candidacy on WhatsApp groups – this should not be a repeat of the capture of someone who could end up in the presidential seat by another group with an interest not in the country’s development but in the control of the resources for private gain, as happened during Nyusi’s presidency.
Finally, Nyusi must realise that his room for manoeuvre has shrunk considerably. The reality is clear: he has no support and, given the state of affairs, the fact that he is still president is not enough for him as each day he sinks deeper and deeper into a quagmire of unpopularity to
to the point where generals are conspiring in broad daylight against his leadership in the succession battle.
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